1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to contact members.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic apparatuses such as cellular phones and smartphones have been reduced in size and thickness, and in response to this, the form of mounting parts on a printed circuit board (hereinafter abbreviated to “board”) provided inside apparatuses has mostly shifted to the surface mounting of chip parts.
In these electronic apparatuses, a ground (GND) line of the board is connected to a conductor panel of the enclosure (so-called frame grounding [FG]) in order to protect electronic parts mounted on the board and to deal with noise. Frame grounding is also performed between boards. In this case, a surface-mount contact member is used to connect respective conductors of the boards.
The contact member used in FG is a member having a spring characteristic, which is formed by bending a leaf spring to have a predetermined amount of stroke. The contact member is joined to a conductor of one of the boards and is compressed by being pressed by the other of the boards to electrically connect the conductors of the boards. In order to establish a stable electrical connection, the contact member for such use is desired to have a spring stroke amount corresponding to the pressing stroke of a board and to have a contact pressure of contact with the board over a wide area in response to pressing by the board.
Furthermore, usually, an automatic mounting apparatus is used to mount electronic parts on the surface of a board. In the case of a large electronic part, the automatic mounting apparatus holds the electronic part by clamping the electronic part with claws, and mounts the electronic part at a predetermined position. On the other hand, in the case of a small electronic part, the electronic part is held by attraction and adhesion using a suction nozzle. Accordingly, such a small electronic part subjected to mounting by the automatic mounting apparatus has an attracted part that is attracted and adhered to the suction nozzle.
Such conventional contact members used for surface mounting include the following.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2009-272237 discloses a surface-mount contact that obtains three levels of contact pressure because of two folded parts and a deformation restricting part and has an attracted surface that is attracted and adhered to a suction nozzle.